There is something quietly revealing about the fact that Jeff Bernhard, CEO of one of America’s most forward-looking healthcare companies, spends his free time tending a vegetable garden. He gives much of what he grows to family and friends. He finds the work grounding, a reminder that the most meaningful things are often rooted in something real.
It would be easy to overlook that detail. But it says a great deal about a man who has spent more than 30 years focused on one central question: what is at the root of America’s healthcare crisis?
For Jeff, the answer has become increasingly clear. It is obesity.
Throughout his career, Jeff has been drawn to the source of a problem, always looking upstream rather than settling for costly downstream consequences. That instinct, sharpened over three decades inside the traditional healthcare system, is what ultimately led him to Onsera Health (onserahealth.com), a technology-enabled healthcare company founded in 2025, headquartered in New York City, and built around a single conviction: obesity is not a side issue in American healthcare.
It is the issue.
Thirty Years and One Stubborn Problem
More than 30 years inside the American healthcare system teaches lessons no classroom, article, or publication ever could. Jeff Bernhard has held senior leadership roles at two of the nation’s largest insurance companies, working across nearly every dimension of the industry, from value-based contracting and advising some of the country’s largest employers to building strategies, businesses, and teams designed to drive meaningful, lasting growth.
He has also helped lead two startup ventures from early promise to real success. Along the way, he has had the privilege of working with some of the most respected leaders and organizations in healthcare. Yet through all of it, one issue kept resurfacing year after year, unresolved and growing in importance.
“For more than 30 years, I worked inside the traditional healthcare system,” Jeff says. “Over that time, one issue remained stubbornly at the center of rising healthcare costs: obesity and cardiometabolic disease.”
Not as a side issue. Not just another cost category. But as the underlying driver of a significant share of what the healthcare system was spending billions to manage, and too often failing to prevent. For most of those three decades, the system’s response was largely reactive, focused on treating the downstream consequences of excess weight: diabetes, musculoskeletal conditions, stroke, heart disease, infertility, certain cancers, and dozens of other related conditions.
“For decades, and still today, we have tried to chop down the tree one branch at a time,” Jeff says. “We have ignored the roots and the trunk that support the rest of the tree. When we focus on the root cause, obesity, we have the opportunity to change the trajectory of so many other chronic conditions. The fact that obesity is still not consistently treated as the chronic disease it is by payers is simply wrong.”
Jeff watched this pattern repeat across the healthcare industry for more than three decades. Then, in October 2025, he connected with Population Health Partners, one of the most innovative organizations in modern healthcare. From that connection, Onsera Health was born.
Today, Onsera is focused on changing the narrative around what is possible, not only in improving health outcomes, but in addressing the healthcare cost trend at its source. Rather than continuing to manage the consequences of obesity after the damage is done, Onsera is built to intervene earlier, more intelligently, and more comprehensively, with the goal of improving lives while bending the long-term cost curve for employers and the broader healthcare system.
The Onsera Health Model
Onsera’s model is built on three integrated pillars, each designed to drive stronger engagement, better outcomes, and a more personalized experience over time. Together, they create a continuous closed-loop system that allows each participant’s journey to become smarter, more tailored, and more effective as care progresses.
Bernhard believes one of the greatest failures in today’s obesity treatment landscape is that many employers and health plans offer GLP-1 medications without the comprehensive clinical support patients need to succeed. The medication may be powerful, but without specialized obesity care, nutrition guidance, lifestyle support, and ongoing clinical coordination, too many patients are left to navigate the journey alone. The result is predictable: nearly half discontinue treatment within six to twelve months, and many regain the weight they lost.
Onsera directly addresses this through close clinical oversight and a personalized member journey that supports participants not just through active weight loss, but through the maintenance phase, helping them keep the weight off and break the cycle of going on and off GLP-1 medications. The result is medication adherence. Onsera expects to reach 90% or higher, a figure that stands in sharp contrast to industry norms and one that the company believes will become one of its most compelling clinical proof points. For employers and plan sponsors, this often limits the return on investment. For patients, it can mean frustration, disappointment, and a return to poor health.
The first pillar, Onsera Intelligence, applies advanced analytics and AI to identify the right participants, inform individualized care pathways, and support ongoing clinical and engagement decisions and outcomes through Onsera’s closed-loop system, a continuous feedback loop of interactions and resulting data points.
The second, Onsera Engage, is the clinical core of the platform: comprehensive, physician-led, evidence-based care tailored to each individual and delivered by a multidisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, dietitians, and coaches trained in obesity medicine.
The third pillar, Onsera Source, addresses one of the most immediate barriers to success: affordability. Through direct contracts with manufacturers, Onsera is able to lower the cost of branded GLP-1 medications by roughly $300 to $500 per patient per month, making access more realistic and sustainable for plan sponsors, employers, and participants alike.
“We do not treat obesity as a drug-only problem or a coaching-only problem,” Jeff says. “We treat it as a complex, chronic disease that requires a coordinated, personalized, and clinically rigorous solution for each participant. That is exactly what we deliver.”
When this model works, its impact is felt on two levels at once.
For employers, it has the potential to reduce healthcare spending across obesity-related populations by addressing a root cause rather than continuing to absorb the mounting cost of downstream conditions and interventions. For participants, the benefit is even more personal: the opportunity not only to lose weight, but to reclaim their health in a sustainable, meaningful way.
Onsera’s focus today is serving self-funded employers and unions, along with their employees, members, and dependents. It is a market that represents approximately 85 million covered lives in the U.S. Over time, the company sees an even larger opportunity to expand into insured health plan populations and Medicare, extending its reach by another 60 to 80 million lives.
Bernhard is especially clear-eyed about the gap that still exists within the broader insurance landscape. Most health plans and health carriers (fully insured), he argues, still do not consistently treat obesity as the chronic disease it is, particularly when it comes to coverage for anti-obesity medications and the broader services required to make those medications effective. That failure has left employers searching for better answers and patients without the support they need. It is also precisely the space Onsera was built to address, offering a more complete path forward where traditional coverage models continue to fall short.
What Sets Onsera Health Apart: A Few Differentiators
When Jeff Bernhard is asked what Onsera offers that the current obesity solutions market does not, he answers with the clarity and precision of someone who has spent decades studying the system from both the inside and the outside.
There are three clear differentiators.
The first is Onsera’s prospective risk score. Much of the industry still relies on retrospective models, measuring a patient’s health risk based on the previous 12 to 24 months. That may be useful for understanding where someone has been, but it says very little about where they are going. If a patient loses 20% to 30% of their body weight through Onsera’s program and materially improves their cardiometabolic health, a backward-looking score fails to capture the transformation already underway.
Onsera takes a different view. Its prospective risk score looks forward, projecting a patient’s expected healthcare cost risk over the next 12 to 24 months based on actual clinical progress, meaningful weight loss, and improvements across obesity-related conditions. Central to those projections is sustained engagement across medication, clinical care, and behavioral support. At 24 months and beyond, medication adherence is what separates programs that deliver durable outcomes from those that produce temporary results.
Onsera’s model is built to support members through maintenance, not just initial weight loss, with the clinical oversight and personalized engagement needed to sustain progress over time. For chief financial officers and plan sponsors, that distinction matters. They do not want to budget against an outdated picture of a person’s health that happened 12 months ago. They want to understand what that person’s expected healthcare cost risk looks like now, and what future healthcare costs are likely to be as health improves. In Bernhard’s view, that is simply a more practical and more honest way to measure value. Onsera is working with a national actuarial firm to validate its prospective risk score methodology.
The second differentiator is what Bernhard calls warm handoffs. Because obesity sits upstream from so many other chronic conditions, Onsera is designed not to operate as another isolated point solution, but as a connected part of the employer’s broader benefits ecosystem. Using its intelligence layer, Onsera can identify when a participant would benefit from another solution the employer already offers, whether that is fertility support, musculoskeletal care, or mental health services, and help guide that connection in a coordinated way.
For employers, that matters because point-solution fatigue is real. Most do not need another disconnected offering. They need something that works within the ecosystem they have already built and helps participants actually navigate it. Onsera is designed to do exactly that, serving as the connective tissue between services and helping ensure patients receive care not only for obesity, but also for the downstream conditions tied to it.
“This is truly maximizing health and spending for an employer,” Bernhard says. “Onsera is a provider-based integrated solution, not a point solution.”
The third differentiator is full connectivity with the broader healthcare system. Onsera’s patients are not receiving care in isolation from Onsera. They also see their primary care physicians, other specialists, and other care providers that Onsera must communicate with for continuity of care. For obesity and cardiometabolic care to be effective, those handoffs cannot be where care breaks down. Yet in traditional healthcare, that is often exactly what happens.
Onsera is built to close those gaps. Through secure data exchange, interoperability, and a technology-enabled care model, Onsera’s clinical team can coordinate more effectively with the broader provider ecosystem while maintaining strict confidentiality and security. The result is a more connected experience for patients, more seamless collaboration with other providers, and a level of convenience and continuity that is often missing in traditional care.
Bernhard sees this as essential to Onsera’s role in the market. The company is not trying to replace the rest of the healthcare system. Its goal is to complement and strengthen the care each patient already receives, using national interoperability, technology, and clinical intelligence to create a more coordinated and personalized specialty model for obesity and cardiometabolic care.
The Onsera Health Closed Loop: Where Clinical Care Meets Intelligence
There is a phrase Jeff Bernhard returns to often when describing what makes Onsera different, and it is worth pausing on: the closed loop.
At one end is deep clinical expertise. Onsera’s physicians, nurses, dietitians, and coaches, all trained in obesity medicine, do not operate as isolated resources. They function as a coordinated care team, delivering medical oversight, behavioral support, nutritional guidance, and sustained engagement that a complex chronic disease like obesity demands.
At the other end is Onsera’s strength in technology, spanning AI, engineering, and product development.
“Our technology and advanced intelligence layers are built to strengthen clinical decision-making, not replace it,” Jeff says. “It allows each care provider to work at the top of their license while helping reduce the burnout that is so widespread across the healthcare system.”
What makes the model especially powerful is the way those two sides continuously improve one another. The clinical model generates real-world patient data and outcomes. That data, in turn, sharpens the intelligence layer over time, helping guide the next best action for both the clinician and the participant. Each patient benefits from a personalized closed loop of insight, one that supports more precise, timely, and informed care throughout the journey.
That intelligence is trained on large-scale claims and related data sets, data from 15 million lives affected by obesity and related conditions, and it is designed to generate actionable insights that support clinical decision-making and participant engagement through continuous improvement with every participant interaction. But Bernhard is clear about the role AI plays inside the model: it is not there to treat patients. It is there to support clinicians with better information, better visibility, and better decision support.
The intelligence layer does far more than personalize care plans; it helps identify who to engage, what actions to take, and how to support clinicians in delivering more effective care. By surfacing actionable insights for clinicians and reducing friction across the patient experience, Onsera Intelligence supports the kind of measurable, documented outcomes employers increasingly expect before committing to any health solution.
“That closed loop between clinical care and intelligence,” Jeff says, “is a major part of what differentiates Onsera from many others in this space. It is a significant investment for us, but we are leaning into it because we believe it is essential to improving the health of our participants and bending the cost curve for employers and plan sponsors across America.”
A Vision Bigger Than Weight
Jeff does not describe Onsera as a weight management company, at least not in the limited sense the phrase might imply.
The company’s larger ambition is to better predict care needs and inform more precise interventions for each patient.
“Onsera’s vision is much bigger than weight management alone,” he says.
The future he is building toward is one where AI, clinical data, and behavioral insight are used to identify health risk before disease fully manifests, to intervene earlier, and to prevent the downstream conditions that have made obesity so catastrophically expensive for individuals and the system alike. The primary focus is cardiometabolic health: the intersection of cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, and the chronic conditions that cluster around both.
“The larger vision,” Jeff says, “is to build an intelligent, predictive model of chronic care that improves outcomes for patients, lowers costs for employers, and changes how healthcare is delivered at scale.”
When he considers the broader question of what it would actually take to reduce the cost of care in the United States, he sees two paths, and Onsera is already walking both.
The first is making obesity manageable and affordable for everyone, bringing medications and programs like Onsera’s within genuine reach of the populations currently shut out. The second is advancing AI and technology to the point where clinicians can practice at the full scope of their training, not weighed down by administrative burden or reactive care, but freed to practice with intelligence-driven foresight.
“We are working through all of this at Onsera,” he says, “and are excited about showing the market what is entirely possible.”
The CEO who practices what he preaches
There is a particular kind of credibility that comes from believing in a product enough to experience it for yourself, not as a gesture, but as a commitment. Jeff Bernhard did exactly that. He joined Onsera’s program personally, determined to understand firsthand what patients experience and what this kind of treatment can truly mean for someone’s health.
He began taking a GLP-1 medication and followed the full lifestyle framework Onsera recommends. In his first four months, he lost 30 pounds, starting from a BMI of 31. But for Bernhard, the number on the scale tells only part of the story. What mattered just as much were the changes that came with it: exercising three times a week, sleeping better, significantly reducing alcohol consumption, and eating far more intentionally.
It reinforced one of the central beliefs behind Onsera’s model: sustainable weight loss is not simply about taking medication. It requires a broader shift in mindset, habits, and daily living, supported by the right clinical care and guidance.
“The result is that I feel 10 to 12 years younger,” he says. “And that has reinforced for me just how life-changing this work can be. It also allows me to speak to patients from personal experience about what is possible through Onsera Health.”
The Philosophy That Drives It
Jeff Bernhard’s leadership philosophy has four parts, and he speaks about them with the clarity of someone who learned them through experience, not theory.
- Mission-driven people first: Hire exceptional people who deeply believe in the mission and the work.
- Clarity and trust: Set a clear direction, then trust talented people to execute without unnecessary oversight.
- Diversity makes organizations stronger: Build teams with diversity of thought, background, and experience, because enduring companies are not built by people who all think alike.
- Intellectual curiosity must never stop: Stay curious, keep learning, and never assume you know enough.
“In addition, focus on a huge addressable market that has a real need, like obesity and its connected conditions,” he says, “With obesity, along with cancer, it is driving costs and poor health across every population across the globe.”
It is a philosophy built for the long game, which feels fitting for a leader who has spent more than three decades inside healthcare and still sees enormous opportunity to improve it.
“When you combine a meaningful mission with great people, high standards, and a constant desire to learn,” he says, “you can build something truly exceptional.”
In 2025, Jeff Bernhard and the team at Onsera Health set out to do exactly that.
Onsera Health, a Company the Market Is Watching Closely
Now, the healthcare industry is watching what comes next, and so are investors, employers, and plan sponsors looking for a more credible answer to one of the most expensive and complex problems in modern healthcare. The question is no longer whether obesity and cardiometabolic disease are driving the cost curve. The question is, what company can actually change it?
Onsera is building to prove that a more intelligent, clinically rigorous, and economically meaningful model can do exactly that at scale, improving the lives of millions while delivering the kind of measurable outcomes the market has been waiting for. With a model designed to materially improve medication adherence relative to industry benchmarks of 90% or higher compared to an industry where nearly half of patients discontinue within the first year, Onsera is building the kind of documented, durable outcomes that employers and plan sponsors have been searching for.
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